


begin again

by OmgReally



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: A bit of something for everyone, A fusion of book/game/TV series canon, AU, Alternate Timelines, Canon-Typical Violence, Divergent Timelines, Emotionally Constipated Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Geralt and Yennefer deserve happiness, Hurt/Comfort, Memory Loss, Not this shit, PTSD, Past Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Post-Canon, What-If, henry cavill as geralt, post-novels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:15:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24773728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OmgReally/pseuds/OmgReally
Summary: As usual, Geralt hasn’t been looking for her but he finds her anyway, only this time, she has no idea who she is.Or, a bit of revisionist history, and a what-if that leaves our wish-crossed lovers at a crossroads of memory and identity and how much of one defines the other.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 21
Kudos: 82





	1. a lonely company

**Author's Note:**

> A brain worm that wouldn’t let me rest until I started to write it. Of course, there will be smut, because this is Geralt and Yennefer. 
> 
> Title from purity ring’s song of the same name.

Mist hung low on the moor, a thick fog that strangled the scrubby, low bushes dotting the rolling, undulating hills; hills that seemed to go on forever, hills that Geralt knew would end a league to the west and give way to dense woodland all the way to the banks of the river Dyphne. They were not far from the nearest town, little more than a signpost and inn in a crossroads on the way to the crossing that would lead to the ruins of Vengerberg some miles north. 

It was pure accident that had led the Witcher and the bard here, a haphazard flight through the Blue Mountains pursued by a gang of hired thugs whose actual target Geralt and Dandelion were ultimately unable to determine, as whenever they drew within speaking distance, the only sound they made were shouted expletives and death-threats. Geralt was reasonably sure this placed Dandelion as the primary suspect to draw such ire, but given his own run of luck upon returning to the world since nearly being speared to death on a peasant’s pitchfork, the target could just as easily have been the Witcher himself. 

“I tell you, Geralt, we should have made for Novigrad. None of this savagery - barbarism! Brutality and violence! Well, less, in any case. Novigrad is a civilised city,” Dandelion was telling him for the umpteenth time, spurring his tired grey mare onward across the soggy flat ground, hooves sinking deep into the sod with each step.

“Civilised like Rivia?” the Witcher grunted from atop Roach. The chestnut mare was as flighty as ever, but he had long since learned her quirks, and was able to keep her pointed towards their destination, occasionally snorting and tossing her head as they trod through the fog. “Barbary is present everywhere, Dandelion. It’s in the hearts of men most of all. I should have stayed on that isle.”

”About that,” the bard mused aloud, his voice taking on a tone the Witcher didn’t much like, because it meant more questions. “You still don’t remember how you made it back to the mainland? Or what happened to-“

”No,” Geralt replied, in a tone of his own, one that brooked no further conversation on the subject. A tone he’d long since learned wouldn’t work on the bard, so he preemptively elaborated: “I don’t. It’s as if my memory is a book with pages torn from it and burned on a campfire. Ashes, Dandelion, all I have left are blackened ashes that slip through my fingers whenever I try to grasp them. So if you’re looking for your next ballad from my tattered recollections, I’ve told you, I wouldn’t bother. I’ve searched for Yennefer for months - for all I know she’s still there, in that grove, and I won’t ever find my way back without Ciri. And Ciri...” He swallowed past the sudden dryness in his mouth. This was the most he’d said in weeks and it hurt to drag from his throat. Each word like a razor: “Ciri is gone.”

”I’m sorry,” Dandelion said shortly, sounding suitably chastised. “I know...Well, look, destiny has led us all on a meandering path over these past few years. And destiny’s a fickle mistress. What seemed certain, inevitable then might turn out more immutable later on. Or, at least,” he added not quite under his breath, “I hope as much.”

”Destiny is a whore,” declared the Witcher, “who will spread her legs for any prick with a long enough sword. I won’t hear another word about it, Dandelion, do you hear me? Not another word.”

They were silent until they came to the village. The fog had cleared somewhat, reaching their horses’ fetlocks instead of up to their riders’ knees, and Geralt was grateful to see more than two feet in front of him. More specifically, he was grateful to see the windows of the inn, from which warm yellow light spilled forth, along with the muted sounds of men’s voices and the shrieking titter of a maid’s thin laughter. 

They tied their horses in the yard next to the water trough and made their way inside, the Witcher with his hood pulled high and Dandelion straightening the ever-present feather in his cap, drooping a bit from the damp.

The voices and laughter ceased as soon as they stepped foot over the threshold. The girlish giggling could have only been from the barmaid, a woman probably closer to thirty than not, who hurried off behind the bar as soon as she took one look at the travelers. The innkeeper somehow managed to make cleaning a tankard look threatening, while six men sitting at three tables glowered at the newcomers in a way the Witcher was all too familiar with. 

“Two ales, my good chap, for these weary travelers!” Dandelion cried, unconcerned. He was not ignorant to an aura of danger; perhaps he was merely desensitised after the sheer amount of dangerous situations his life had been placed in since meeting the Witcher. For his part, Geralt sensed only a reasonable amount of mistrust from the eyes staring at them, a common reaction from a small town's occupants on having their night of drinking interrupted by a hooded stranger and a fop barging in out of the mist. 

”Right y’are,” grunted the innkeeper after a moment. He was a grizzled sort whose ruddy face was almost swallowed by fluffy grey muttonchops, and whose small beady eyes darted from Dandelion to the Witcher and back again until the former produced some coin from his pouch and laid it down on the bar with a soft _clink_. After which, he was all too accommodating, setting down two frothing tankards forthwith. “And whence d’yer weary travels take you, if’n I may ask?”

”You may ask,” said the Witcher after taking a deep fraught of the, to be quite honest, watery excuse for an ale. “You mayn’t get an answer, though.”

”Like that, is it?” The innkeeper scowled, and the barmaid who could hardly still be called a maid tittered in a surprisingly convincing fashion. “Well, we ain’t too nosey here in Bleakmire, that’s true. Ain’t that true, Ingrid?” The bar-not-quite-maid tittered again. “Specially not nosey at those with coin.” Dandelion had placed another on the bar top, which Muttonchops made disappear swiftly. “We’re a civilised lot here. You’ll see,” he added, moving away to tend to his other customers, who had turned back to their own conversations at last. 

“See, Geralt?” Dandelion beamed over his tankard. “A touch of civilisation - that’s what we needed.”

“Not sure this place would meet the definition. Even the name is depressing.”

”You bite your tongue, sir,” the barmaid sniffed. The woman was still paying a goodly more attention to them than the rest of the inn's motley occupants. In particular, she kept trying to steal a glance under the Witcher's hood for a look at his face. He didn’t oblige her. “Bleakmire's a fine place. We even have our own herbalist now!”

”Oh ho. A herbalist! Hear that, Dandelion? You think the towers of Thanedd could hold up to this place? Or the halls of Oxenfurt!” Geralt snorted into his thin ale. 

“Mock as you like, but she’s a right mist-ter-ree, that one,” the woman continued, leaning over the bar to give them an unintentional view of her freckled, aging cleavage. “Came to us on the back of a storm, she did. Washed up on the banks of the river! Frozen half to death and when we thawed her out, we thought her an idiot, a mute, for she didn’t speak for days - but once we put her out to the field to work, she came back not with wheat, but with twigs and berries and all sorts, and she brewed it up into a potion that cured old Ogden’s bloody cough, and more she did - young Aspley can walk again because of her! Queer woman, though, as all those types are. We call her the Lady.” Unconcerned with her audience’s waning interest as Geralt drained his tankard and looked around, and Dandelion fished a moth out of his, she continued. “Looks straight through you with those violet eyes of hers sometimes, it’s-"

Geralt’s tankard shattered in his hand. Bits of ceramic pinged off the bar top. He stared straight ahead as the barwoman gasped at him in astonishment. 

“ _What did you say?”_


	2. wandering feet

"Geralt - Geralt! Wait!"

He didn't heed the bard's words, striding ahead across the muddy ground through the misty village, his cloak flapping behind him. Dandelion hurried to keep up, nearly tripping in the mud and miscellaneous animal leavings soaking into the sparse excuse for a road. After demanding directions to the herbalist's hut, the Witcher had taken off without a word, but the bard knew the set to his jaw and the dangerous glint to his inhuman eyes - he was on a mission. And he wasn't going to listen to old Dandelion, oh no. That didn't stop him from trying to appeal to his common sense, though he doubted the Witcher had much when it came to Yennefer.

Yennefer...Could it really be her? When Geralt had returned from the Isle of Mist, alone, the scars from the pogrom in Rivia still fresh in his chest, he had been unusually tight-lipped about the sorceress. Five years had passed since Dandelion had watched her and the Witcher sail off with Ciri into the fog, and he honestly hadn't expected to see any of them ever again. Yet Geralt had sought him out in Oxenfurt and they had resumed their travels together against the backdrop of another looming war with Nilfgaard, pursued as always by various unsavory characters seeking their demise, and the search for Yennefer had faded into the background.

And Ciri...Geralt wouldn't even talk about Ciri.

But now, the mention of violet eyes and coal-black hair had spurred a fire in the white-haired Witcher, a fire Dandelion remembered well from five years hence. He wouldn't allow himself to be stopped by simple logic. Yet, he tried.

"You can't just go barging into some poor botanist's hut in the middle of the night! What if it isn't her, eh? We'll be chased out of the village with torches and pitchf- swords! Let's get a room at the inn and- oh, sod it - " He hadn't been watching where he was going and sunk his leather bootheel into a pad of what he hoped was mud, but didn't smell like it. To his astonishment, though, Geralt had also stopped. He stood in the road, his head bowed, cloak flapping about in a suitably dramatic fashion, and Dandelion saw the broad line of his shoulders shift in a sigh.

"You're right," he rumbled under his breath. "Damn it, Dandelion - you're right." His astonishment did not abate, and he found himself gaping at the Witcher as he turned and began to trudge back towards the inn. He quickly shook himself from his reverie, and his boot from the mud, and followed.

"I am?"

"Yes. We'll get you a room. I'll sleep in the stable with Roach. We'll go see her in the morning...Whoevershe turns out to be."

Geralt had come up against many dead ends in the search for Yennefer. Exclusively so, in fact. None of her old acquaintances had seen her, presuming her dead of course, and him as well, which meant that the search had taken even longer, what with the necessity in dispelling all of the shock and awe expressed at his sheer nascence before he could move on. 

He scarcely remembered those first few months, bent over Roach's neck, flying from town to town, city to city, all across the Continent. He had again been a man possessed by a singular mission, not to find his ward this time, but his lover. She eluded him. And Ciri...

He couldn't think about Ciri. He knew, deep in his bones, that she was safe - but he also knew that he would not see her again. Not in this life.

So Yennefer was all that he had left. Well, her, and Dandelion.

The foppish bard had not changed, even after everything, after five years, and Geralt was glad of it. Dandelion was the ever-annoying bedrock he could anchor himself to in a world that had long since moved past times of contempt, baptisms of fire, prophecy and portends. Dandelion was...Dandelion.

Which made it all the more infuriating when he was right.

The fire of flight cooled, the Witcher trudged back with him to the inn. Muttonchops did not seem particularly surprised to see them again, nor did the barwoman, although she had a knowing look in her crows' eyes he didn't much like. Nevertheless, she brought more beer, and the innkeep agreed to let Dandelion a room for more of the bard's coin - lawfully gained, surprisingly, by plays he had penned in Oxenfurt - and the two weary travelers retired for the night.

Geralt didn't sleep a wink. 

The morning broke thinly, the sunlight waning, struggling through a cloak of thick grey clouds. Geralt stretched the stiffness out of his back, his joints popping. He ignored them. Mortality had proven a slow pursuant, unable to catch up to him yet. 

Dandelion was up already, he was surprised to see, nursing a miserable looking bowl of gruel at a table in the inn. He looked up as the Witcher entered, picking straw out of his white hair, and smiled.

"Morning, Geralt," he greeted cheerfully. Far too cheerfully. "How did you sleep?"

"Not at all," the Witcher grunted, signalling the barwoman - the same one from last night - to bring over more gruel as he hauled himself onto the bench across from Dandelion. "And you? You're up early." He made his suspicion plain in his gaze, under which the bard shifted uncomfortably, clearing his throat.

"Yes, well...Ingrid here told me last night, before I retired, that the Lady - the herbalist - usually goes flower-gathering at dawn, so I may have gotten up to go and, well, see her before she departed..."

Geralt sat very still, looking at the tabletop as Ingrid deposited another bowl of grey gruel onto it in front of him. Its lumpy surface did nothing for his appetite, even less than Dandelion's words.

"And?" he ground out from between clenched teeth, slowly, very slowly and deliberately, picking up his spoon. It remained intact in his hand. Dandelion had had to pay for last night's broken tankard.

"I went up to the house but she'd already left," the bard said quickly, sensing Geralt's impatience and being mindful of it, for once. "She wasn't home, Geralt. So I, ah...I may have done some poking around. The door was unlocked. Quite unlike Yennefer, I must say, if it is her, which I seriously doubt," he added. "It was fairly plain inside. No trunks full of dresses, no makeup or unguents. Not even a mirror! Just...lots and lots of herbs, herbs everywhere. Bowls. A well-used mortar and pestle. A threadbare handmade quilt on the bed. This woman, violet eyes or not, lives simply, Geralt. Too simply to be our missing sorceress."  
  
The Witcher began to eat, slowly, without tasting, which was probably good because he doubted the gruel tasted any better than it looked. He said nothing.

"She'll probably be back by now," Dandelion continued, a tad more gently, as he watched the muscle twitch in Geralt's jaw. "We could go there now, if you'd like."

"Now you're in a hurry?" he grunted in response. "Let me finish my breakfast, bard."

"All right, Geralt," said Dandelion slowly, gently, knowingly. He broke eye contact and looked down at his own bowl, suddenly not hungry at all. "All right."

He wasn't sure what he was more afraid of - if this purple-eyed medicine woman turned out to be Yennefer...

...Or if she wasn't.


	3. watching you creep

For once, Dandelion had been surprisingly accurate in his descriptions, without any unnecessary flourishes or exaggeration. This was rare for the bard, who preferred flowery embellishment in his stories, spoken or otherwise. Yet his account of the mysterious violet-eyed herbalist's abode was faithful. 

It was a small shack just beyond the outskirts of town, surrounded by well-tended gardens of verbena and beggartick blossoms which bloomed in white-red rows outside the window. Geralt peered inside, but he had not sensed, smelled or felt anybody inside, and the cursory glance into the dim interior confirmed it.

Nothing about the outside of the house spoke to him of Yennefer. He sensed nothing familiar here, no telltale scent of lilac and gooseberries - although perhaps it had been drowned out by the verbena. Still, he felt an odd mix of dimming hope and trepidation as he circled the house and pushed the front door, unlocked as Dandelion had said, open without a sound.

The interior was just one room with a wooden dividing screen separating the combined living, eating and sleeping area from a large tin bathtub. This was the only thing he could conflate with Yennefer; she did love her baths. Everything else was decidedly...plain. The ramshackle wooden table next to the woodfire stove bore a few glass alembics and pipettes, a well-used mortar and pestle, and the faint trace of various herbs, mostly healing in nature. The bed was covered in a threadbare handmade quilt and a flattened pillow. There wasn't much else to the room; a crate of bottled, jarred and bound bundles of herbs, a bottle of lotion that when sniffed smelled distinctly medicinal, a plain linen nightdress hung over the wooden screen. Geralt picked the edge of the fabric up and brought it to his face, sniffing deeply.

He smelled only verbena and herbs and the faint hint of sweat. Even the sweat he did not recognize. There was no hint of lilac and gooseberries.

"It's not her," the Witcher said in a low voice to Dandelion, who stood on the threshhold facing out to keep an eye out for the herbalist's return. He glanced over his shoulder at Geralt with a frown.

"You can be sure just by...smelling her undergarments? Oh, what am I saying, of course you can." Yet the bard did not say what Geralt had been expecting: a smug 'I told you so'. In fact, Dandelion seemed quite dejected as they left the little cottage and stood in the yard among the beggartick bushes.

"Yennefer would never live so simply," Geralt said. "Unless imprisoned." He remembered Castle Strygga and her twisted hands, with a shudder that didn't reach his face. "By all accounts this herbalist is here of her own will."

"Perhaps she has a secret hidden underground lair? This is Yennefer we're talking about, after all."

"No," Geralt said sadly. "It's not."

He turned to head back to the village, and that was when he saw her.

The woman stood at the edge of the furthest row of verbena, her long brown cloak fluttering in the mild autumn wind. Her hair was long and black, tied back by a simple leather cord and flowing down her back. Beneath the cloak she wore a loose green cotehardie belted at the waist, cut to just above her knees, with worn brass buttons, and tight-fitting patchwork leather pants sewn from hides of multiple different animals. Her boots were worn and covered in mud, as was the end of her cloak - she had been out in the woods or on the moors, trudging through mud for the entire morning, either collecting herbs or hunting, for she had a knife at her belt and a bulging bag, bow and quiver slung over her shoulder.

And as her violet eyes met Geralt's, her right hand moved towards her knife. Her hands were gloved, the fingers long and slender. 

"Yen," he croaked, ashamed of the weakness in his voice. It had been years since he had seen her yet it felt like no time at all and decades at once, her appearance winding him, driving the breath from his lungs. "It is you."

Dandelion stood astonished, similarly unable to find words, quite uncharacteristically so for him. It was her - the sorceress in all her glory, although she seemed faded, washed out by the colours she wore, as muddy and drab as Bleakmire itself. She could have passed for any everyday, run-of-the-mill medicine woman, save for her hauntingly beautiful, pale triangular face and the blazing defiance in her bright eyes. Defiance that seemed to fizzle and be replaced by fear as she took a step back, her hand tight on the hilt of her knife but not yet drawing it from its sheath. She seemed terrified as she looked at them, looked at the sword standing proud over Geralt's shoulder. Her eyes didn't leave it as she spoke.

"Who are you? What do you want? If it's valuables, I have none. If it's healing, you'll have to come back later. I gave the last of my medicinal draught to Jannik's daughter for her fever, I don't-" The words were tumbling from her trembling lips, thrust from her throat like frightened birds. This was not the Yennefer that Dandelion knew, who had more haughtiness than any Queen he had ever met, than even his dear Annarietta. Yennefer would never stumble over her words nor blanche at the sight of a Witcher and his sword, step backwards as if about to flee.

Geralt had anticipated her. He crossed through the verbena in a few short strides and grabbed her around the arms before she could react. She gasped and tried to yank the knife from its scabbard but fumbled, and it went tumbling into the dirt.

"Yen, it's me," the Witcher hissed, his face inches from hers. Her eyes were wide and scared. He had never seen a look like that in Yennefer's eyes, not even when she was threatened with death or worse. "It's Geralt."  
  
"I don't care who you are, get your hands off me!" There, that was slightly more like the sorceress - the commanding tone entered her voice for a moment, so that Geralt automatically let go, but he didn't step back. She did instead, brushing down her sleeves, her cheeks red and her teeth worrying her full lips.

"I don't know you," she said slowly, after the three of them stood there in a silent triangle of confusion for a few moments. "Either of you. I think you have mistaken me for someone else. I'm sorry."

Geralt watched her go as she walked to her cottage, entered, and shut the door behind her. He stared at the closed door until awareness came back to him, awareness of his tightly clamped jaw, his clenched fists, and of Dandelion's hand on his shoulder.

"We should leave her be for now," the bard was saying. "We'll come back later. Geralt...Come on, Geralt."

After a moment, the Witcher gave the slightest of nods. He was completely silent as he followed the bard back to the village, and by some miracle, Dandelion was silent as well.

For once, he had no idea what to say.


	4. like a lake leaves you alone in her depths

Yen.

Yennefer...his Yennefer. It had been her, Geralt was sure of it. He had been this sure before about many things in his life. Not all of them had turned out to be as clear as he had thought. Ciri, for example, although thinking of her now, here, after witnessing the blank stare in Yennefer's lovely violet eyes as they met his...It hurt too much. He turned away from the memory of the gangly girl dancing with a sword and later, the graceful young woman slicing, cleaving her way down the stairs, blood dripping into her white-streaked hair...

"Geralt?" The bard's lilting voice brought the Witcher back to the present. He looked up, realizing he had not said a word since they had left the herbalist's hut, walked all the way back to the village and sat back down at a table in the inn. Mugs of semi-passable beer had been brought to them and still he had said nothing, too caught up with memories wheeling like screeching seagulls in his head.

Like seagulls circling the tower of Thanedd...

Geralt gave a shudder, folding his arms against his chest, and tilting his head so that his hair fell across his unnatural eyes, mostly so that Dandelion couldn't see their expression. It deterred him not.

"Well...I think we can say with reasonable certainty that _that_ was, indeed, our Yennefer," Dandelion continued when it became evident Geralt still wasn't going to respond to any gentle or not so gentle nudgings. "Unless she has a twin. Does she have a twin, Geralt? You never mentioned it."

"No. She doesn't," he grunted, and leaned forward to take a mug of beer. "So this is either coincidence that in this world, there is a woman who looks almost exactly like Yennefer who happened to wind up here after a storm, of all things, in a town you and I just happened to stumble across in our travels."

"You sould almost hopeful that it's a coincidence," Dandelion prompted, sipping his own beer and letting out a hiss of distaste. He kept drinking it, though.

"If it isn't a coincidence - if she is not exactly as she seems, just a woman who has more than a passing resemblence to Yennefer - if she is, in fact, Yennefer of Vengerberg, powerful sorceress who survived Sodden, who survived Thadden and Strygga and Vilgefortz himself...Then we are, again, tangled up in destiny."

He fairly spat the world, the consonants and vowels flung from his mouth as quickly as he could be rid of them. It felt as if it left a bad aftertaste in his mouth. Destiny always did. 

"You said yourself you spent most of your time looking for her. Why is it so bad that she turns up now?"

"Because..." Geralt's head sagged down even lower, his chin met his chest. He seemed to deflate before Dandelion, who wondered if he ought not to have asked the question. "Because I gave up, Dandelion. I thought for sure she was dead or...worse when none of my letters, sent to every corner of the world, every acquaintance she or I ever met, gained no reply. I thought she was gone when every familiar face had the same expression: A shake of the head, a thinning of the lips, a sad shadow in the eyes that screams 'Not here, Wolf, not here. She has never been here'. She is...She was gone, Dandelion. And believed me, I spent most of those years doing naught but searching."

"I know," the bard replied grimly. "When I got your letter I knew something terrible must have happened, I admit, but - I was also so damn glad you were alive! It was wrong of me, I think, to assume Yennefer had just gone off somewhere to follow her own agenda, her own path, as she so often did. Does," he added, glancing about. "Clearly. I wonder what she has in mind for this village."

"If it's her, there's something worse than any of her usual machinations afoot," Geralt continued, emotionlessly, cold. "She didn't recognize me at all, Dandelion. Not at all. I looked her in the eyes and there was...nothing." He remembered the soft warmth of her shoulders, one still very slightly higher than the other, the bones and tendons corded tight with fear beneath his hands eclipsing them. It was her fear that scared him the most. Yennefer had _never_ been afraid of him.

Perhaps that was one of the reasons he loved her so much.

"Could it be a spell?" wondered Dandelion, swishing the remains of his mug around in the bottom slowly, staring out the window. "An illness? She was found half-frozen by the river, we've been told. She could be sick. Perhaps a head injury or a similar malady."

"Could be." It was the only energy Geralt had spare to agree with Dandelion: Just this one thing. This last hope.

This hope that she hasn't made herself forget.

"We'll go back this afternoon, perhaps? With a little more...natural introduction. Perhaps you'll let me do the introductions this time?"

"FIne."

It was a bad idea. Geralt knew it was a bad idea. But he was tired, so tired...And so alone.

Yennefer. His Yen. Gone, one way or another. He knew it now. Either she was dead...or her memory of him was.

And just like that, Geralt knew what a real death was. A real death is the death you die when the person you love no longer remembers you.


	5. cursed by your dust filled head

It had not been a good day.

The onset of the fog almost three days hence meant visibility was reduced, and while she knew Bleakmire and its surrounds more intimately than the back of her hand, she was reluctant to venture off without a clear indicator where she was going. Fog like this was common, but something about this fog - the density, perhaps, or the way it swirled, describing eldritch, twisting shapes in the half-light of the moon, brought to mind....Something. Something like a whisper, a voice in the back of her mind that had plagued her ever since she woke up on the side of the river, coughing water out of her lungs, scooping sand out of her eyes and teeth.

She was not that sad, waterlogged thing any longer. They called her the Seaweed Lady for a while, for the way her long, black hair hung over her head and shoulders, weighed down with algae. The name had, after some threats, lost the first part and so she became just...the Lady. 

The memories were there, she knew, in the deep, dark recesses of her mind, places she would rather not touch. The whispering voice told her it would hurt too much, told her to stay away, to swim on the surface of this thin facade and hope that it would be enough for the world to reabsorb her as she is, not as she was. Other times, though, the voice would taunt her, tempt her to touch, and it felt like she was reaching to plunge her hand into a river of blood, so she would always pull back, just shy of the surface.

None of the villagers knew who she was. None of the traders that passed through the towns knew her either - _or they pretended not to know, and averted their eyes_ \- the voice cut in, as it was wont to do at inopportunue moments, leaving her feeling stiff and irritable, her hands aching.

She'd had her fingers broken at one point, clearly, methodically, one by one. Torture, perhaps? They were still healing, but looked like they had years to go. But then just three months in Bleakmire and she could feel the misshapen bones begin to knit themselves smooth. Remarkable. They looked perfect again, the digits long and nimble, and lovely crescent nails - but that damned ache deep in the joints would worry her sometimes. At first she thought it was the weather but after a while she grew to recognize it. She recognized it when she brewed her potions, when she would lay a hand on a feverish girl's forehead or a foolish farmboy's wound. Once she had touched the distended stomach of the farmer's unwell, heavily pregnant cow and had then immediately ordered him to cut the calves from the bulging womb as soon as possible. Terrified, the toothless old man had - naturally - refused, but the next morning he came to her with his hat in his hands and admitted that Bessie had given birth that night, and one of the calves had strangled itself on its own umbilical cord, its decomposition poisoning the others in utero. They all died, and the mother had to be put down.

Through incidents like this, she had slowly gained a reputation around town as a wise woman, a herbalist, a healer who knew things. It sounded...not quite right, but close enough to what she felt she was than 'Seaweed Lady'.

They still called her the Lady. That was fine. It was a title that demanded respect even without context. This, the Lady approved of.

So when two - brutes, perhaps? Certainly a bruiser, with the sword tall over his shoulder, silver-studded leathers cinched tight over bulging muscles, a jaw harder than granite and an inhuman gaze to match, and his lackey, a foppish sort of sorts that usually followed men like that around, turned up on her doorstep, she did not expect the treatment she was given.

Yen. Yennefer. The name stuck with her, even if not much else had after they'd parted. It sounded...familiar, like a half-remembered song. _It's a terrible song, full of death and darkness_ , the voice inside her said, and she shuddered against the wind, leaning against her favourite oak tree in the field beyond her hut. _If you remember it, it will only bring hurt._

The voice had never spoken this much. With a shock, the Lady realized that the frothing, bubbling voice full of rage and longing was hers. Her voice.

"Why?" she asked herself, in the not-quite-emptiness of the woods. Birds took flight, animals scurried in the undergrowth: Dinner. "Why must it only bring hurt?"

_Because death dogs his footsteps. And yours, too. Remember that. Remember..._

"I don't want to remember anything like that," she said firmly, straightening up. SHe must have looked insane to anyone watching - talking to herself or worse, the tree. Well, she was a finer herbalist than this bloody Bleakmire had ever known, so they'd just have to put up with eccentricities then, wouldn't they? 

She straightened her cloak and walked away into the fog, letting it embrace her, curling around her hands and feet, welcoming her deeper. Welcoming her home.


	6. breathe in your fiery air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whenever they meet, sparks fly.

"Ah...the Lady, yes? Or, er, do you prefer merely 'Lady'? My Lady, perhaps? M'lady...?" 

It was pure coincidence that Dandelion found her in Bleakmire's equally bleak excuse for a market, browsing an old toothless woman's stall of wilting carrots and browning cabbages. She had her back to him, but there was no mistaking the raven curls cascading down her back, even without the telltale dress of black-and-white or the lingering scent of lilac and gooseberries and deceit and heartbreak.

Although there was plenty of that, oh yes - Yennefer had never failed to cause Geralt pain. Despite his words outside the hut, he was also fairly certain this was Yennefer, if the deep funk Geralt had sunk into after their 'reunion' was anything to go by. For days now the Witcher only rarely emerged from the barn and spoke only to Roach, or to Dandelion in monosyllabic grunts. The bard had considered asking when they might move on, but the dangerous look in the Witcher's eyes when he had opened his mouth to do so had made him swiftly snap it shut again.

She turned, and her violet eyes flashed. Oh yes, this was definitely Yennefer. Dandelion was unsure if it was a game she was playing, some scheme or plot, the purpose of which he could not possibly hope to fathom. 

"What do you want?" she asked, aloof, cold, and eerily familiar. She had taken that tone with him many a time. Which made it even harder to believe she didn't remember him. She picked up a rutebega and turned it over, wrinkling her nose at the browning leaves and quickly putting it back down again.

"Nothing, actually. From you, in any case. I was out for a walk, and I don't know if you've noticed, but the scenery here is quite depressing, so I wandered the town until I ended up here, and, well, the rest you know...Yennefer."

"Don't call me that," she snapped instantly. "I am not this 'Yennefer' person. I don't know you or the white-hair, despite his insistence. Stop bothering me."

However Dandelion, despite his jaunty, blithe exterior, was actually quite a good study of people, and observant to boot, a fact that was frequently to the Witcher's chagrin. Bards had to be, in order to wrest the deepest of meaning from the slightest of expressions, or thrown-away words. Nothing was thrown away when Dandelion was considered. So he caught the slight frown between the Lady's brows even as she turned away and flicked a wrist dismissively at him.

"But it is bothering you, isn't it?" he prodded, sidling closer. "He woke something in you when he called you that name. I can see it in your eyes. Not a memory, no, but perhaps - a feeling?"

"I said, _begone_!" The word was a command, uttered with such force - such magical force, that Dandelion with his Elvish blood could feel in the firmament of his bones - that the bard was forced to take a step back. He cleared his throat, smoothed his doublet and straightened the feather in his hat.

"Very well," he said, doing his best to sound unaffected. "But you know as well as I that you cannot run from this. You two are bound together by destiny - always have been, always will be. Wherever you turn, wherever you run - there he'll be. Whether you like it or not...Yennefer."

And before she could retort, because memory or no, he was still very much afraid of what she might retort, Dandelion turned and hurried away.

*

The barn smelled of horse sweat and freshly-shoveled manure, of damp straw and ozone. It was dark, the only light admitted in a thin strip from the doorway as she pushed it open, first an inch, then another. It fell across the ground in a silvery stripe, illuminating first the hay and muck-covered hard packed dirt floor, and then a pile of straw, and then a pair of boots, which belonged to the Witcher sitting in the straw. 

His eyes were closed and he was apparently in repose with his head tilted back. He wore his shirt open, and she could see the glint of a necklace peeking from beneath it. His silver studded doublet was hung over the nearby barrier, beyond which his horse, a chestnut mare, stood in silent watchfulness, snorting softly.

The Lady picked her way carefully through the barn, edging ever closer to the Witcher. He did not react. He appeared to be asleep or in a deep meditation. Soon she was close enough to examine closely the grey stubble forming on his chin, the faint white scars criss-crossing his skin, the calluses on his fingertips.

She wondered if she ought to feel something, being this close to him. She looked deep within herself, searching for that horrible, dark feeling of dread she had felt before upon seeing him for what she thought was the first time. But she felt nothing.

The Lady reached out and touched the silvery chain showing from beneath his shirt and slowly eased out the medallion attached to it. It depicted a wolf's head, fangs bared and snarling. She wasn't sure but she imagined it was vibrating slightly.

All at once, the Witcher surged up. He grabbed her hand, clutching it fiercely as her fingers closed around the medallion, and she felt the metal biting into her palm. But she felt no fear even as his strange, inhuman eyes opened and fixed on hers, and she knew at once he could see her perfectly well even in the darkness.

"Why are you here?" he growled, his voice like smoke and gravel mixed together. "What do you want? To torment me?"

"No," she murmured, surprised at how steady her voice was, without so much as a quaver. "I...I don't know what I want. To understand, perhaps."

"You and me both." He snorted derisively and let her go. She fell back on her haunches, in the hay and the muck. Geralt sighed, leaning his arms on his legs and hanging his head between them. He did not look as terrifying as he had before, grasping her so ardently in front of her hut, demanding she remember.

She considered apologizing, but some emotion, some thought bubbled up within her before she could open her mouth: He did not deserve an apology. 

"Why am I angry at you?" she wondered aloud, the feeling taking shape almost at the same time as she vocalized it. "Why, when I look at you, do I feel a terrible emptiness, a yawning void of longing and bitterness? Why-" She cut herself off, shook her head, and pushed herself up to stand. "No. This is foolishness."

But Geralt was staring up at her with those strange, inhuman eyes, and while she knew she should turn on her heel to leave, she didn't. She couldn't. She stood, transfixed by his gaze.

"Yennefer," he said, soft, almost reverent. "I'm sorry."

_The apples hang on the tree, glistening golden in the half-light of the sunset. They are beautiful, round and ripe and bountiful. She scowls at them._

_"I have to go," he says, sorrow so thick in his voice she can't stand it, she doesn't want to look at him, doesn't want to see the regret in his eyes because it will change nothing, nothing. "She could be out there, somewhere, anywhere-"_

_"Not in this world, Geralt. You know it as well as I. She is gone, beyond our reach - don't you think if I thought otherwise I would be the first to suggest we leave, together? But I feel in my marrow that Ciri has departed, and nothing we do will change that. So stay. Stay with me."_

_He doesn't meet her gaze. "Yennefer," he says heavily. "I'm sorry."_

"No!" She lashes out, a dam within her breaking, giving way to...something. Something else. It curls around her heart like a vice, squeezing, robbing the breath from her lungs, a feeling like pins and needles in her veins. It flows from her in the form of sparks, of fire, and it roars in the violet reflection of her eyes before she knows what is happening. 

Before she knows what is happening, the Witcher is scooping her up into his arms and grabbing the reins of the frantically rearing Roach, he is leading them to the door and the darkness outside as the flames billow and crackle behind them.

And then all she knows is oblivion.


	7. interlude

"She's still asleep. She's burning up, Geralt - is that normal? This fever? She shakes and mumbles in her sleep, too, words I can't quite catch..."

"They're not words meant for you to catch, Dandelion." The Witcher sounded weary, and the bard knew it wasn't just from helping the villagers to keep the barn and the inn from burning down, or from concocting the ridiculous story of a fallen candle in order to protect Yennefer, or even from carrying the unconscious witch all the way from the village back to her hut. No, there was more to it than that - but this time, Dandelion couldn't get him to open up about how he was feeling. Usually a near-impossible feat; now, with the Witcher's mood, Dandelion wasn't even going to bother to try. 

He couldn't help but just poke a bit, though. "Did Yennefer say anything to you? Before she tried to kill you?"

From his seat on the bed at her feet, Geralt looked up and glowered. "I thought you weren't convinced she is Yennefer," he said through gritted teeth. "And she didn't try to kill me."

"Oh, no? Well, I present evidence to the contrary on point B: the burns on your arms." Geralt didn't even look down. They weren't that bad, truthfully, mere raw spots on his shoulders, biceps and elbows where the heat had eaten through his shirt. Dandelion had seen the Witcher in much worse condition.

"She lost control."

"Evidence for point A: She is Yennefer, a sorceress not known for a great deal of control when it comes to-" He was silenced by Geralt's glare, suddenly aware of the thin line he was treading. He withdrew, only to turn to the woman on the bed and frown as she moaned and twitched.

It had been eight hours since the incident in the barn and she hadn't returned to consciousness, but it seemed like something was plaguing her deep in the darkness of her dreams or nightmares. Something gripped her in the recesses of her mind, kept her there, weak and wriggling, her skin feverishly hot and sweaty. Dandelion wrung out a rag and soaked it again in the bucket of cool stream water by the bed, folding it once it was damp and holding it out to place on Yennefer's forehead.

Geralt intercepted him, catching his wrist and taking the cloth from his fingers. "Thank you for your help, Dandelion, but that's really unecessary. I can take care of her myself." He laid the cloth gently over her forehead. Yennefer hissed but made no other outside reaction. Dandelion sighed.

"Fine. I'll go - into the village to see if there are any other healers here. But from what everyone's told me of Yennefer's escapades since she's been here, curing everything from gout to the common cold to impotence, I'd say she's the only one. Maybe try looking around in her stores for any appropriate healing herbs while I'm gone." With that, he left, only looking back once to catch a glimpse of the Witcher's face - set in stone, as always, but with a brow heavier with darker thoughts than he'd seen in a long while.


End file.
